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MokaFive has announced a new version of its virtual desktop management solution, called MokaFive Suite 3.0, that introduces full support for Windows 7, improved security, and multitenancy capabilities for managed service providers.

MokaFive is one of a growing list of virtual desktop or VDI companies trying to address the security, cost, and ease of desktop administration, as well as improve the overall ease with which Windows 7 can be deployed and rolled out into production environments.

This company isn't new to this market; in fact, MokaFive has been around since 2005 and has been working on some interesting technologies. Unfortunately for the company, Forrest Gump himself wouldn't necessarily call MokaFive a "household name," which is usually a major problem for a small business trying to get name recognition in a space crowded with industry giants like Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware.

Part of the problem is the long list of competitors with various strategies to solving the same problems. But MokaFive takes a slightly different approach to virtual desktop management and the way it provides virtual desktops to end-users. The company created a virtual desktop, called a LivePC, with images that update dynamically and automatically and can be deployed quickly, according to the company. Because the MokaFive solution runs LivePC images locally on standard client hardware, not on servers in the datacenter, users can work anywhere -- regardless of network connectivity.

LivePCs run on the endpoint device via the MokaFive Player, a lightweight application that gets installed on the local computer and controls the entire virtual desktop, including the underlying hypervisor. All of this is done on top of a Type-2 hypervisor (or a hosted virtualization environment). MokaFive doesn't offer its own hypervisor; instead, the company has taken an agnostic approach to the hypervisor layer so that the customer isn't locked into a specific virtualization platform. The company supports popular Type-2 hypervisors such as VMware Player, Parallels Workstation, Virtual Box, and VMware Fusion.

And because MokaFive's technology addresses the needs of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X users, the company can also help organizations realize the concept known as "Bring Your Own Computer," or BYOC, where users choose their own platform at work, whether that be Windows or Mac.

Once the LivePC image is downloaded to the end-user device, everything for the user happens locally -- be it online or offline to the network. The LivePCs themselves run locally but are managed centrally. MokaFive is running in the data center, and it provides all of the central deployment, security scans, patching, updates, and policy controls needed in a client-based environment. It can even reach out and destroy an image stored on the player if a PC is lost or stolen.

MokaFive Suite 3.0 includes new capabilities such as the following:

Windows 7 support. The earlier MokaFive releases did not support Windows 7, but the 3.0 release adds support for both the 32-bit and x64 editions of Windows.